Vagrant back to peeing in the streets after hospital release
A disgusting derelict who’s turning the Upper West Side into an open-air toilet was back at it Sunday — just hours after two hospitals deemed him fit to wander the city’s streets.
The foul-smelling vagrant, whom police sources identified as John Tucker, 49, was spotted urinating in the street on Ninth Avenue at West 47th Street at around 1:30 p.m. It capped a daylong ramble of rummaging through West Side garbage cans between 85th and 46th streets.
Tucker’s reappearance outraged residents who recognized him from the front pages of The Post, which showed him taking a leak in the street and then in handcuffs before one of his psychiatric evaluations Saturday.
“He’s been on the cover of the newspaper . . . and he’s back in the same spot. I can’t believe it!” said retiree Pinky Light, 87.
A friend sharing a sidewalk bench with Light was also appalled.
“It’s a revolving door. Maybe when he hurts someone or kills somebody, then they’ll do something about it,” he said.
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Photo: John M. Mantel
Calvin Baez, 37, blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio for the situation, saying, “This is de Blasio’s New York now.”
“He doesn’t care because he doesn’t live here,” Baez said. “This guy pisses outside Gracie Mansion or in Park Slope, you would see how fast de Blasio would get rid of him.”
State Sen. Marty Golden, a former NYPD cop, said he couldn’t understand how Tucker ended up back on the street.
“There should have been triage and social services provided,” said Golden (R-Brooklyn). “We are a compassionate city. But if someone is homeless and not taking his meds, he should be put in an institution. He should not be walking the streets. It’s only a matter of time before someone like this goes off the deep end and kills someone.”
A police source compared Tucker to Larry Hogue,
the infamous crackhead dubbed the “Wild Man of 96th Street” for terrorizing the Upper West Side in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hogue’s erratic behavior included stalking and threatening residents. He was finally jailed for attacking a 16-year-old girl.
He wound up in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, from which he slipped away in 2009, then got caught less than two days later back in his old stomping grounds.
On Sunday, Tucker, who could be smelled from 20 feet away, denied being the bum pictured on the front pages of the Saturday and Sunday Posts, although he was wearing the same filthy Mets blanket.
“That wasn’t me. Everyone knows I am a good guy,” he insisted.
Tucker stormed off, ranting in Spanish, “When you are homeless, no one cares about you.”
He was later spotted intently reading The Post’s coverage of his antics.
Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal (D-Upper West Side) said, “There’s no question in my mind that he needs mental health care.
“When he was taken in to be evaluated, why did they decide he didn’t have to go to Bellevue [Hospital] at that time?” she said.
A spokesman for the Mount Sinai Health System, which runs Roosevelt and St. Lukes hospitals where Tucker was examined, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
http://nypost.com/2015/07/13/vagrant-back-to-peeing-in-the-streets-says-he-is-a-good-guy/
